Palestinians (Arabic: الفلسطينيون, al-Filasṭīniyyūn; Hebrew: פָלַסְטִינִים, Fālasṭīnīm) or Palestinian people (الشعب الفلسطيني, ash-sha‘b al-Filasṭīnī), also referred to as Palestinian Arabs (الفلسطينيين العرب, al-Filasṭīniyyīn al-ʿArab), are an ethnonational group[31][32][33][34][35][36][37] descending from peoples who have inhabited the region of Palestine over the millennia, and who are today culturally and linguistically Arab.[38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45]
Despite various wars and exoduses, roughly one half of the world's Palestinian population continues to reside in the territory of former British Palestine, now encompassing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (the Palestinian territories) as well as Israel.[46] In this combined area, as of 2005[update], Palestinians constituted 49 percent of all inhabitants,[47] encompassing the entire population of the Gaza Strip (1.865 million),[48] the majority of the population of the West Bank (approximately 2,785,000 versus some 600,000 Israeli settlers, which includes about 200,000 in East Jerusalem), and almost 21 percent of the population of Israel proper as part of its Arab citizens.[49] Many are Palestinian refugees or internally displaced Palestinians, including more than a million in the Gaza Strip,[50] around 750,000 in the West Bank,[51] and around 250,000 in Israel proper. Of the Palestinian population who live abroad, known as the Palestinian diaspora, more than half are stateless, lacking legal citizenship in any country.[52] Between 2.1 and 3.24 million of the diaspora population live as refugees in neighboring Jordan;[53][54] over 1 million live between Syria and Lebanon, and about 750,000 live in Saudi Arabia, with Chile holding the largest Palestinian diaspora concentration (around half a million) outside of the Arab world.
Founded in 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization is an umbrella organization for groups that represent the Palestinian people before international states.[62] The Palestinian National Authority, officially established in 1994 as a result of the Oslo Accords, is an interim administrative body nominally responsible for governance in Palestinian population centres in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.[63] Since 1978, the United Nations has observed an annual International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. According to British historian Perry Anderson, it is estimated that half of the population in the Palestinian territories are refugees, and that they have collectively suffered approximately US$300 billion in property losses due to Israeli confiscations, at 2008–2009 prices.[64]
The Greek toponym Palaistínē (Παλαιστίνη), which is the origin of the ArabicFilasṭīn (فلسطين), first occurs in the work of the 5th century BCE Greek historian Herodotus, where it denotes generally[65] the coastal land from Phoenicia down to Egypt.[66][67] Herodotus also employs the term as an ethnonym, as when he speaks of the 'Syrians of Palestine' or 'Palestinian-Syrians',[68] an ethnically amorphous group he distinguishes from the Phoenicians.[69][70] Herodotus makes no distinction between the Jews and other inhabitants of Palestine.[71]
A depiction of Syria and Palestine from CE 650 to 1500
Syria Palestina continued to be used by historians and geographers and others to refer to the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, as in the writings of Philo, Josephus and Pliny the Elder. During the second or third decades of the 2nd century, Syria Palaestina became the official administrative name for the new province that encompassed most of Judaea, in a move commonly viewed as an action by emperor Hadrian to "disassociate the Jewish people from their historical homeland" or as a "punishment" for the Bar Kokhba revolt.[77][78] There is no evidence as to when the name change was implemented or by whom.[79] Jacobson suggested the name to be rationalized by the fact that the new province was far larger than geographical Judea, with the name of Syria Palaestina already in use for centuries by the time the Bar Kokhba revolt took place.[80][81]
The new administrative name was printed on coins, in inscriptions and even appeared in rabbinic texts.[77][82] The Arabic word Filastin has been used to refer to the region since the time of the earliest medieval Arab geographers. It appears to have been used as an Arabicadjectival noun in the region since as early as the 7th century CE.[83] The Arabic newspaper Falastin (est. 1911), published in Jaffa by Issa and Yusef al-Issa, addressed its readers as "Palestinians".[84]
During the Mandatory Palestine period, the term "Palestinian" was used to refer to all people residing there, regardless of religion or ethnicity, and those granted citizenship by the British Mandatory authorities were granted "Palestinian citizenship".[85] Other examples include the use of the term Palestine Regiment to refer to the Jewish Infantry Brigade Group of the British Army during World War II, and the term "Palestinian Talmud", which is an alternative name of the Jerusalem Talmud, used mainly in academic sources.
Following the 1948 establishment of Israel, the use and application of the terms "Palestine" and "Palestinian" by and to Palestinian Jews largely dropped from use. For example, the English-language newspaper The Palestine Post, founded by Jews in 1932, changed its name in 1950 to The Jerusalem Post. Jews in Israel and the West Bank today generally identify as Israelis. Arab citizens of Israel identify themselves as Israeli, Palestinian or Arab.[86]
The Palestinian National Charter, as amended by the PLO's Palestinian National Council in July 1968, defined "Palestinians" as "those Arab nationals who, until 1947, normally resided in Palestine regardless of whether they were evicted from it or stayed there. Anyone born, after that date, of a Palestinian father – whether in Palestine or outside it – is also a Palestinian."[87] Note that "Arab nationals" is not religious-specific, and it includes not only the Arabic-speaking Muslims of Palestine but also the Arabic-speaking Christians and other religious communities of Palestine who were at that time Arabic-speakers, such as the Samaritans and Druze. Thus, the Jews of Palestine were/are also included, although limited only to "the [Arabic-speaking] Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the [pre-state] Zionist invasion." The Charter also states that "Palestine with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit."[87][88]
The origins of Palestinians are complex and diverse. The region was not originally Arab – its Arabization was a consequence of the gradual inclusion of Palestine within the rapidly expanding Islamic Caliphates established by Arabian tribes and their local allies. Like in other "Arabized" Arab nations, the Arab identity of Palestinians, largely based on linguistic and cultural affiliation, is independent of the existence of any actual Arabian origins.
Palestine has undergone many demographic and religious upheavals throughout history. By the 4th century, the Jews had become a minority.[89] The Jewish population in Jerusalem and its environs in Judea never fully recovered as a result of the Jewish-Roman Wars. In the following centuries, the emigration of Jews and the immigration of Christians, as well as the conversions of Jews, Samaritans and pagans, led to a Christian majority in Late Roman and Byzantine Palestine.[90][91][92]
In the 7th century, the Arab Rashidunsconquered the Levant; they were later succeeded by other Arabic-speaking Muslim dynasties, including the Umayyads, Abbasids and the Fatimids.[93] Over the following several centuries, the population of Palestine drastically decreased, from an estimated 1 million during the Roman and Byzantine periods to about 300,000 by the early Ottoman period.[94][95] Eventually, much of the existing population gradually adopted Arab culture and language and converted to Islam.[92] Although minor in size, the settlement of Arabs is also thought to have played a role in accelerating the Islamization process.[96][97][98][99] Some scholars suggest that by the arrival of the Crusaders, Palestine was already overwhelmingly Muslim,[100][101] while others claim that it was only after the Crusades that the Christians lost their majority, and that the process of mass Islamization took place much later, perhaps during the Mamluk period.[102][103]
For several centuries during the Ottoman period the population in Palestine declined and fluctuated between 150,000 and 250,000 inhabitants, and it was only in the 19th century that a rapid population growth began to occur.[104] The migration of Egyptians and Algerians to Palestine during the first half of the 19th century, and the subsequent immigration of Algerians, Bosnians, and Circassians during the second half of the century, also contributed to this population growth.[105][106][107]
Pre-Arab/Islamic influences on the Palestinian national identity
While Palestinian culture is today primarily Arab and Islamic, many Palestinians identify with earlier civilizations that inhabited the land of Palestine.[108] According to Walid Khalidi, in Ottoman times "the Palestinians considered themselves to be descended not only from Arab conquerors of the seventh century but also from indigenous peoples who had lived in the country since time immemorial."
It is well known to those familiar to the country that whatever else they may be, the Fellahin, or native peasantry of Palestine, are not Arabs; and if we judge from the names of the topographical features their language can scarcely be called Arabic.[109]
Similarly Ali Qleibo, a Palestinian anthropologist, argues:
Throughout history a great diversity of peoples has moved into the region and made Palestine their homeland: Canaanites, Jebusites, Philistines from Crete, Anatolian and Lydian Greeks, Hebrews, Amorites, Edomites, Nabataeans, Arameans, Romans, Arabs, and Western European Crusaders, to name a few. Each of them appropriated different regions that overlapped in time and competed for sovereignty and land. Others, such as Ancient Egyptians, Hittites, Persians, Babylonians, and the Mongol raids of the late 1200s, were historical 'events' whose successive occupations were as ravaging as the effects of major earthquakes ... Like shooting stars, the various cultures shine for a brief moment before they fade out of official historical and cultural records of Palestine. The people, however, survive. In their customs and manners, fossils of these ancient civilizations survived until modernity—albeit modernity camouflaged under the veneer of Islam and Arabic culture.[108]
The Arabs' connection with Palestine goes back uninterruptedly to the earliest historic times, for the term 'Arab' [in Palestine] denotes nowadays not merely the incomers from the Arabian Peninsula who occupied the country in the seventh century, but also the older populations who intermarried with their conquerors, acquired their speech, customs and ways of thought and became permanently arabised.[110]
Clearly, in Palestine as elsewhere in the Middle East, the modern inhabitants include among their ancestors those who lived in the country in antiquity. Equally obviously, the demographic mix was greatly modified over the centuries by migration, deportation, immigration, and settlement. This was particularly true in Palestine, where the population was transformed by such events as the Jewish rebellion against Rome and its suppression, the Arab conquest, the coming and going of the Crusaders, the devastation and resettlement of the coastlands by the Mamluk and Turkish regimes, and, from the nineteenth century, by extensive migrations from both within and from outside the region. Through invasion and deportation, and successive changes of rule and of culture, the face of the Palestinian population changed several times. No doubt, the original inhabitants were never entirely obliterated, but in the course of time they were successively Judaized, Christianized, and Islamized. Their language was transformed to Hebrew, then to Aramaic, then to Arabic.[111]
Arabization of Palestine
The term "Arab", as well as the presence of Arabians in the Syrian Desert and the Fertile Crescent, is first seen in the Assyrian sources from the 9th century BCE (Eph'al 1984).[112] Southern Palestine had a large Edomite and Arab population by the 4th century BCE.[113] Inscriptional evidence over a millennium from the peripheral areas of Palestine, such as the Golan and the Negev, show a prevalence of Arab names over Aramaic names from the Persian period, 550-330 BCE onwards.[114][115] Bedouins have drifted in waves into Palestine since at least the 7th century, after the Muslim conquest. Some of them, like the Arab al-Sakhr south of Lake Kinneret trace their origins to the Hejaz or Najd in the Arabian Peninsula, while the Ghazawiyya's ancestry is said to go back to the Hauran's Misl al-Jizel tribes.[116] They speak distinct dialects of Arabic in the Galilee and the Negev.[117]
Arab populations had existed in some parts of Palestine prior to the conquest, and some of these local Arab tribes and Bedouin fought as allies of Byzantium in resisting the invasion, which the archaeological evidence indicates was a 'peaceful conquest',[dubious – discuss] and the newcomers were allowed to settle in the old urban areas. Theories of population decline compensated by the importation of foreign populations are not confirmed by the archaeological record.[99]
A loom at work making a traditional Palestinian keffiyeh in Hebron, Palestine. The keffiyeh is a traditional headdress with origins in Arabia
Following the Muslim conquest of the Levant by the Arab Muslim Rashiduns, the formerly dominant languages of the area, Aramaic and Greek, were gradually replaced by the Arabic language introduced by the new conquering administrative minority.[118] Among the cultural survivals from pre-Islamic times are the significant Palestinian Christian community, roughly 10% of the overall population in late Ottoman times and 45% of Jerusalem's citizens,[119] and smaller Jewish and Samaritan ones, as well as an Aramaic substratum in some local Palestinian Arabic dialects.[120][page needed]
The Christians appear to have maintained a majority in much of both Palestine and Syria under Muslim rule until the Crusades. The original conquest in the 630s had guaranteed religious freedom, improving that of the Jews and the Samaritans, who were classified with the former.[121][122][123] However, as dhimmi, adult males had to pay the jizya or "protection tax". The economic burden inflicted on some dhimmi communities (especially that of the Samaritans) sometimes promoted mass conversions.[124] When the Crusaders arrived in Palestine during the 11th century, they made no distinction between Christians who for the Latin rite were considered heretics, Jews and Muslims, slaughtering all indiscriminately.[125][126] The Crusaders, in wresting holy sites such as the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem from the Orthodox church were among several factors that deeply alienated the traditional Christian community, which sought relief in the Muslims. When Saladin overthrew the Crusaders, he restored these sites to Orthodox Christian control.[127] Together with the alienating policies of the Crusaders, the Mongol Invasion and the rise of the Mamluks were turning points in the fate of Christianity in this region, and their congregations – many Christians having sided with the Mongols – were noticeably reduced under the Mamluks. Stricter regulations to control Christian communities ensued, theological enmities grew, and the process of Arabization and Islamicization strengthened, abetted with the inflow of nomadic Bedouin tribes in the 13th and 14th centuries.[128]
A veiled Arab woman in Bersheeba, Palestine c.1940
Palestinian villagers generally trace the origins of their clan (hamula) to the Arabian peninsula. Many avow oral traditions of descent from nomadic Arab tribes that migrated to Palestine during or shortly after the Islamic conquest.[129] By this claim they attempt to connect themselves to the greater narrative of Arab-Islamic civilization, with origins that are more highly valued Arab socio-cultural context than to genealogical descent from local ancient pre-Arab or pre-Islamic peoples. Even so, these Palestinians still consider themselves to have historical precedence to the Jews,[129] whom they regard as Europeans who only began to immigrate to Palestine in the 19th century.
Arabs in Palestine, both Christian and Muslim, settled and Bedouin were historically split between the Qays and Yaman factions.[137] These divisions had their origins in pre-Islamic tribal feuds between Northern Arabians (Qaysis) and Southern Arabians (Yamanis). The strife between the two tribal confederacies spread throughout the Arab world with their conquests, subsuming even uninvolved families so that the population of Palestine identified with one or the other.[137][138] Their conflicts continued after the 8th century Civil war in Palestine until the early 20th century[139] and gave rise to differences in customs, tradition, and dialect which remain to this day.[137]
Beit Sahour was first settled in the 14th century by a handful of Christian and Muslim clans (hamula) from Wadi Musa in Jordan, the Christian Jaraisa and the Muslim Shaybat and Jubran, who came to work as shepherds for Bethlehem's Christian landowners, and they were subsequently joined by other Greek Orthodox immigrants from Egypt in the 17th–18th centuries.[140]
During the first half of the 19th century, there were several waves of immigration from Egypt to Palestine. They favored settling in already established localities. There used to be 19 villages in the southern coastal plains and near Ramla with families of Egyptian descent, and to this day, some villages in the northern parts of the region of Samaria, especially the 'Ara Valley, have a sizeable population of Egyptian descent.[105] In addition, some rural and urban Palestinians have Albanian, Bosnian, Circassian, or other non-Arab ancestry due to the legacy of the Ottoman period, which brought non-Arab communities to the region in the 19th century.[105][106][107]
Claims emanating from certain circles within Palestinian society and their supporters, proposing that Palestinians have direct ancestral connections to the ancient Canaanites, without an intermediate Israelite link, has been an issue of contention within the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Bernard Lewis wrote that "the rewriting of the past is usually undertaken to achieve specific political aims ... In bypassing the biblical Israelites and claiming kinship with the Canaanites, the pre-Israelite inhabitants of Palestine, it is possible to assert a historical claim antedating the biblical promise and possession put forward by the Jews."[111][142]
Some Palestinian scholars, like Zakariyya Muhammad, have criticized pro-Palestinian arguments based on Canaanite lineage, or what he calls "Canaanite ideology". He states that it is an "intellectual fad, divorced from the concerns of ordinary people."[143] By assigning its pursuit to the desire to predate Jewish national claims, he describes Canaanism as a "losing ideology", whether or not it is factual, "when used to manage our conflict with the Zionist movement" since Canaanism "concedes a priori the central thesis of Zionism. Namely that we have been engaged in a perennial conflict with Zionism—and hence with the Jewish presence in Palestine—since the Kingdom of Solomon and before ... thus in one stroke Canaanism cancels the assumption that Zionism is a European movement, propelled by modern European contingencies..."[143]
Commenting on the implications of Canaanite ideology, Eric M. Meyers, a Duke University historian of religion, writes:
What is the significance of the Palestinians really being descended from the Canaanites? In the early and more conservative reconstruction of history, it might be said that this merely confirms the historic enmity between Israel and its enemies. However, some scholars believe that Israel actually emerged from within the Canaanite community itself (Northwest Semites) and allied itself with Canaanite elements against the city-states and elites of Canaan. Once they were disenfranchised by these city-states and elites, the Israelites and some disenfranchised Canaanites joined to challenge the hegemony of the heads of the city-states and forged a new identity in the hill country based on egalitarian principles and a common threat from without. This is another irony in modern politics: the Palestinians in truth are blood brothers or cousins of the modern Israelis — they are all descendants of Abraham and Ishmael, so to speak.[144]
Relationship to the Jewish people
Depiction of Palestine in the time of Saul c. 1020 BC according to George Adam Smith's 1915 Atlas of the Historical Geography of the Holy Land
A number of pre-Mandatory Zionists, from Ahad Ha'am and Ber Borochov to David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Zvi thought of the Palestinian peasant population as descended from the ancient biblical Hebrews, but this belief was disowned when its ideological implications became problematic.[143] Ahad Ha'am believed that, "the Moslems [of Palestine] are the ancient residents of the land ... who became Christians on the rise of Christianity and became Moslems on the arrival of Islam."[143]Israel Belkind, the founder of the Bilu movement also asserted that the Palestinian Arabs were the blood brothers of the Jews.[145] Ber Borochov, one of the key ideological architects of Marxist Zionism, claimed as early as 1905 that "[t]he Fellahin in Eretz-Israel are the descendants of remnants of the Hebrew agricultural community",[146] believing them to be descendants of the ancient Hebrew residents "together with a small admixture of Arab blood".[143] He further believed that the Palestinian peasantry would embrace Zionism and that the lack of a crystallized national consciousness among Palestinian Arabs would result in their likely assimilation into the new Hebrew nationalism, and that Arabs and Jews would unite in class struggle.[143][147]
David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later becoming Israel's first Prime Minister and second President, respectively, suggested in a 1918 paper written in Yiddish that Palestinian peasants and their mode of life were living historical testimonies to Israelite practices in the biblical period.[143][148] They wrote that the fellahin are descendants of ancient Jewish and Samaritan peasants who continued farming the land after the Jewish-Roman wars, converting to Christianity and then to Islam to avoid paying Jizya.[149] Tamari notes that "the ideological implications of this claim became very problematic and were soon withdrawn from circulation."[143]Salim Tamari notes the paradoxes produced by the search for "nativist" roots among these Zionist figures, particularly the Canaanist followers of Yonatan Ratosh,[143] who sought to replace the "old" diasporic Jewish identity with a nationalism that embraced the existing residents of Palestine.[150]
In his book on the Palestinians, The Arabs in Eretz-Israel, Belkind advanced the idea that the dispersion of Jews out of the Land of Israel after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Roman emperor Titus is a "historic error" that must be corrected. While it dispersed much of the land's Jewish community around the world, those "workers of the land that remained attached to their land," stayed behind and were eventually converted to Christianity and then Islam.[145] He therefore, proposed that this historical wrong be corrected, by embracing the Palestinians as their own and proposed the opening of Hebrew schools for Palestinian Arab Muslims to teach them Arabic, Hebrew and universal culture.[145]Tsvi Misinai, an Israeli researcher, entrepreneur and proponent of a controversial alternative solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, asserts that nearly 90% of all Palestinians living within Israel and the occupied territories (including Israel's Arab citizens and Negev Bedouin)[151] are descended from the Jewish Israelite peasantry that remained on the land, after the others, mostly city dwellers, were exiled or left.[152]
Many Palestinians referred to their Jewish neighbors as their awlâd 'ammnâ or paternal cousins.[153] Some Palestinians claim descent from Arab tribes who entered the region during the Islamic conquest, and consider themselves to have historical precedence to the Jews, whom they regard as Europeans who only began to immigrate to Palestine in the 19th century. By such a claim, they inserted their family's history into the narrative of Islamic civilization and connected themselves to genealogy that possessed greater prestige than that of ancient or pre-Islamic descent.[154] Several Palestinian extended families, most notably the Makhamra family of Yatta, have recent traditions of having a Jewish ancestry.[155][156][157][158]
A study found that the Palestinians, like Jordanians, Syrians, Iraqis, Turks, and Kurds have what appears to be Female-Mediated gene flow in the form of Maternal DNA Haplogroups from Sub-Saharan Africa. 15% of the 117 Palestinian individuals tested carried maternal haplogroups that originated in Sub-Saharan Africa. These results are consistent with female migration from eastern Africa into Near Eastern communities within the last few thousand years. There have been many opportunities for such migrations during this period. However, the most likely explanation for the presence of predominantly female lineages of African origin in these areas is that they may trace back to women brought from Africa as part of the Arab slave trade, assimilated into the areas under Arab rule.[159]
According to a study published in June 2017 by Ranajit Das, Paul Wexler, Mehdi Pirooznia, and Eran Elhaik in Frontiers in Genetics, "in a principal component analysis (PCA) [of DNA], the ancient Levantines [from the Natufian and Neolithic periods] clustered predominantly with modern-day Palestinians and Bedouins..."[160] In a study published in August 2017 by Marc Haber et al. in The American Journal of Human Genetics, the authors concluded that "The overlap between the Bronze Age and present-day Levantines suggests a degree of genetic continuity in the region."[161]
In a 2003 genetic study, Bedouins showed the highest rates (62.5%) of the subclade Haplogroup J-M267 among all populations tested, followed by Palestinian Arabs (38.4%), Iraqis (28.2%), Ashkenazi Jews (14.6%) and Sephardic Jews (11.9%), according to Semino et al.[162] Semitic-speaking populations usually possess an excess of J1 Y chromosomes compared to other populations harboring Y-haplogroup J.[162][163][164][165] The haplogroup J1, the ancestor of subclade M267, originates south of the Levant and was first disseminated from there into Ethiopia and Europe in Neolithic times. J1 is most common in Palestine, as well as Syria, Iraq, Algeria, and Arabia, and drops sharply at the border of non-semitic areas like Turkey and Iran. A second diffusion of the J1 marker took place in the 7th century CE when Arabians brought it from Arabia to North Africa.[162]
A 2013 study by Haber et al. found that "The predominantly Muslim populations of Syrians, Palestinians and Jordanians cluster on branches with other Muslim populations as distant as Morocco and Yemen." The authors explained that "religious affiliation had a strong impact on the genomes of the Levantines. In particular, conversion of the region's populations to Islam appears to have introduced major rearrangements in populations' relations through admixture with culturally similar but geographically remote populations leading to genetic similarities between remarkably distant populations." The study found that Christians and Druze became genetically isolated following the arrival of Islam. The authors reconstructed the genetic structure of pre-Islamic Levant and found that "it was more genetically similar to Europeans than to Middle Easterners."[166]
In a genetic study of Y-chromosomal STRs in two populations from Israel and the Palestinian Authority Area: Christian and Muslim Palestinians showed genetic differences. The majority of Palestinian Christians (31.82%) were a subclade of E1b1b, followed by G2a (11.36%), and J1 (9.09%). The majority of Palestinian Muslims were haplogroup J1 (37.82%) followed by E1b1b (19.33%), and T (5.88%). The study sample consisted of 44 Palestinian Christians and 119 Palestinian Muslims.[167]
In recent years, genetic studies have demonstrated that, at least paternally, Jewish ethnic divisions and the Palestinians are related to each other.[168] Genetic studies on Jews have shown that Jews and Palestinians are closer to each other than the Jews are to their host countries.[169][170] At the haplogroup level, defined by the binary polymorphisms only, the Y chromosome distribution in Arabs and Jews was similar but not identical.[171]
According to a 2010 study by Behar et al. titled "The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people", Palestinians tested clustered genetically close to Bedouins, Jordanians and Saudi Arabians which was described as "consistent with a common origin in the Arabian Peninsula".[172] In the same year a study by Atzmon and Harry Ostrer concluded that the Palestinians were, together with Bedouins, Druze and southern European groups, the closest genetic neighbors to most Jewish populations.[173]
One DNA study by Nebel found substantial genetic overlap among Israeli/Palestinian Arabs and Jews.[174] Nebel proposed that "part, or perhaps the majority" of Muslim Palestinians descend from "local inhabitants, mainly Christians and Jews, who had converted after the Islamic conquest in the seventh century AD".[168]
A 2020 study on remains from Canaanaite (Bronze Age southern Levantine) populations suggests a significant degree of genetic continuity in Arabic-speaking Levantine populations (such as Palestinians, Druze, Lebanese, Jordanians, Bedouins, and Syrians), as well as in several Jewish groups (such as Ashkenazi, Iranian, and Moroccan Jews), suggesting that the aforementioned groups derive over half of their entire atDNA ancestry from Canaanite/Bronze Age Levantine populations,[175] albeit with varying sources and degrees of admixture from differing host or invading populations depending on each group. The results also show that a significant European component was added to the region since the Bronze Age (on average ~8.7%), excluding the Ashkenazi populations who harbour a ~41% European-related component. The European component is highest in Moroccan and Ashkenazi Jews, both having a history in Europe.[176] The study concludes that this does not mean that any of these present-day groups bear direct ancestry from people who lived in the Middle-to-Late Bronze Age Levant or in Chalcolithic Zagros; rather, it indicates that they have ancestries from populations whose ancient proxy can be related to the Middle East. These present-day groups also show ancestries that cannot be modeled by the available ancient DNA data, highlighting the importance of additional major genetic effects on the region since the Bronze Age.[176]: 1146–1157
The timing and causes behind the emergence of a distinctively Palestinian national consciousness among the Arabs of Palestine are matters of scholarly disagreement. Some argue that it can be traced as far back as the peasants' revolt in Palestine in 1834 (or even as early as the 17th century), while others argue that it did not emerge until after the Mandatory Palestine period.[59][177] Legal historian Assaf Likhovski states that the prevailing view is that Palestinian identity originated in the early decades of the 20th century,[59] when an embryonic desire among Palestinians for self-government in the face of generalized fears that Zionism would lead to a Jewish state and the dispossession of the Arab majority crystallised among most editors, Christian and Muslim, of local newspapers.[178] The term itself Filasṭīnī was first introduced by Khalīl Beidas in a translation of a Russian work on the Holy Land into Arabic in 1898. After that, its usage gradually spread so that, by 1908, with the loosening of censorship controls under late Ottoman rule, a number of Muslim, Christian and Jewish correspondents writing for newspapers began to use the term with great frequency in referring to the 'Palestinian people'(ahl/ahālī Filasṭīn), 'Palestinians' (al-Filasṭīnīyūn) the 'sons of Palestine(abnā’ Filasṭīn) or to 'Palestinian society',(al-mujtama' al-filasṭīnī).[179]
Whatever the differing viewpoints over the timing, causal mechanisms, and orientation of Palestinian nationalism, by the early 20th century strong opposition to Zionism and evidence of a burgeoning nationalistic Palestinian identity is found in the content of Arabic-language newspapers in Palestine, such as Al-Karmil (est. 1908) and Filasteen (est. 1911).[180] Filasteen initially focused its critique of Zionism around the failure of the Ottoman administration to control Jewish immigration and the large influx of foreigners, later exploring the impact of Zionist land-purchases on Palestinian peasants (Arabic: فلاحين, fellahin), expressing growing concern over land dispossession and its implications for the society at large.[180]
Historian Rashid Khalidi's 1997 book Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness is considered a "foundational text" on the subject.[181] He notes that the archaeological strata that denote the history of Palestine – encompassing the Biblical, Roman, Byzantine, Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Crusader, Ayyubid, Mamluk and Ottoman periods – form part of the identity of the modern-day Palestinian people, as they have come to understand it over the last century.[61] Noting that Palestinian identity has never been an exclusive one, with "Arabism, religion, and local loyalties" playing an important role, Khalidi cautions against the efforts of some extreme advocates of Palestinian nationalism to "anachronistically" read back into history a nationalist consciousness that is in fact "relatively modern".[182][183]
Khalidi argues that the modern national identity of Palestinians has its roots in nationalist discourses that emerged among the peoples of the Ottoman empire in the late 19th century that sharpened following the demarcation of modern nation-state boundaries in the Middle East after World War I.[183] Khalidi also states that although the challenge posed by Zionism played a role in shaping this identity, that "it is a serious mistake to suggest that Palestinian identity emerged mainly as a response to Zionism."[183]
Khalil Beidas's 1898 use of the word "Palestinians" in the preface to his translation of Akim Olesnitsky's A Description of the Holy Land[184]
Conversely, historian James L. Gelvin argues that Palestinian nationalism was a direct reaction to Zionism. In his book The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War he states that "Palestinian nationalism emerged during the interwar period in response to Zionist immigration and settlement."[185] Gelvin argues that this fact does not make the Palestinian identity any less legitimate: "The fact that Palestinian nationalism developed later than Zionism and indeed in response to it does not in any way diminish the legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism or make it less valid than Zionism. All nationalisms arise in opposition to some 'other.' Why else would there be the need to specify who you are? And all nationalisms are defined by what they oppose."[185]
David Seddon writes that "[t]he creation of Palestinian identity in its contemporary sense was formed essentially during the 1960s, with the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization." He adds, however, that "the existence of a population with a recognizably similar name ('the Philistines') in Biblical times suggests a degree of continuity over a long historical period (much as 'the Israelites' of the Bible suggest a long historical continuity in the same region)."[186]
Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal consider the 1834 Peasants' revolt in Palestine as constituting the first formative event of the Palestinian people. From 1516 to 1917, Palestine was ruled by the Ottoman Empire save a decade from the 1830s to the 1840s when an Egyptian vassal of the Ottomans, Muhammad Ali, and his son Ibrahim Pasha successfully broke away from Ottoman leadership and, conquering territory spreading from Egypt to as far north as Damascus, asserted their own rule over the area. The so-called Peasants' Revolt by Palestine's Arabs was precipitated by heavy demands for conscripts. The local leaders and urban notables were unhappy about the loss of traditional privileges, while the peasants were well aware that conscription was little more than a death sentence. Starting in May 1834 the rebels took many cities, among them Jerusalem, Hebron and Nablus and Ibrahim Pasha's army was deployed, defeating the last rebels on 4 August in Hebron.[187]Benny Morris argues that the Arabs in Palestine nevertheless remained part of a larger national pan-Arab or, alternatively, pan-Islamist movement.[188]Walid Khalidi argues otherwise, writing that Palestinians in Ottoman times were "[a]cutely aware of the distinctiveness of Palestinian history ..." and "[a]lthough proud of their Arab heritage and ancestry, the Palestinians considered themselves to be descended not only from Arab conquerors of the seventh century but also from indigenous peoples who had lived in the country since time immemorial, including the ancient Hebrews and the Canaanites before them."[189]
A 1930 protest in Jerusalem against the British Mandate by Palestinian women. The sign reads "No dialogue, no negotiations until termination [of the Mandate]"
Zachary J. Foster argued in a 2015 Foreign Affairs article that "based on hundreds of manuscripts, Islamic court records, books, magazines, and newspapers from the Ottoman period (1516–1918), it seems that the first Arab to use the term "Palestinian" was Farid Georges Kassab, a Beirut-based Orthodox Christian." He explained further that Kassab's 1909 book Palestine, Hellenism, and Clericalism noted in passing that "the Orthodox Palestinian Ottomans call themselves Arabs, and are in fact Arabs," despite describing the Arabic speakers of Palestine as Palestinians throughout the rest of the book."[190]
Bernard Lewis argues it was not as a Palestinian nation that the Arabs of Ottoman Palestine objected to Zionists, since the very concept of such a nation was unknown to the Arabs of the area at the time and did not come into being until very much later. Even the concept of Arab nationalism in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, "had not reached significant proportions before the outbreak of World War I."[43] Tamir Sorek, a sociologist, submits that, "Although a distinct Palestinian identity can be traced back at least to the middle of the nineteenth century (Kimmerling and Migdal 1993; Khalidi 1997b), or even to the seventeenth century (Gerber 1998), it was not until after World War I that a broad range of optional political affiliations became relevant for the Arabs of Palestine."[177]
Israeli historian Efraim Karsh takes the view that the Palestinian identity did not develop until after the 1967 war because the Palestinian exodus had fractured society so greatly that it was impossible to piece together a national identity. Between 1948 and 1967, the Jordanians and other Arab countries hosting Arab refugees from Palestine/Israel silenced any expression of Palestinian identity and occupied their lands until Israel's conquests of 1967. The formal annexation of the West Bank by Jordan in 1950, and the subsequent granting of its Palestinian residents Jordanian citizenship, further stunted the growth of a Palestinian national identity by integrating them into Jordanian society.[191]
The idea of a unique Palestinian state distinct from its Arab neighbors was at first rejected by Palestinian representatives. The First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations (in Jerusalem, February 1919), which met for the purpose of selecting a Palestinian Arab representative for the Paris Peace Conference, adopted the following resolution: "We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds."[192]
An independent Palestinian state has not exercised full sovereignty over the land in which the Palestinians have lived during the modern era. Palestine was administered by the Ottoman Empire until World War I, and then overseen by the British Mandatory authorities. Israel was established in parts of Palestine in 1948, and in the wake of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the West Bank was ruled by Jordan, and the Gaza Strip by Egypt, with both countries continuing to administer these areas until Israel occupied them in the Six-Day War. Historian Avi Shlaim states that the Palestinians' lack of sovereignty over the land has been used by Israelis to deny Palestinians their rights to self-determination.[193]
Today, the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination has been affirmed by the United Nations General Assembly, the International Court of Justice[194] and several Israeli authorities.[195] A total of 133 countries recognize Palestine as a state.[196] However, Palestinian sovereignty over the areas claimed as part of the Palestinian state remains limited, and the boundaries of the state remain a point of contestation between Palestinians and Israelis.
The first Palestinian nationalist organizations emerged at the end of the World War I.[197] Two political factions emerged. al-Muntada al-Adabi, dominated by the Nashashibi family, militated for the promotion of the Arabic language and culture, for the defense of Islamic values and for an independent Syria and Palestine. In Damascus, al-Nadi al-Arabi, dominated by the Husayni family, defended the same values.[198]
Article 22 of The Covenant of the League of Nations conferred an international legal status upon the territories and people which had ceased to be under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire as part of a 'sacred trust of civilization'. Article 7 of the League of Nations Mandate required the establishment of a new, separate, Palestinian nationality for the inhabitants. This meant that Palestinians did not become British citizens, and that Palestine was not annexed into the British dominions.[199] The Mandate document divided the population into Jewish and non-Jewish, and Britain, the Mandatory Power considered the Palestinian population to be composed of religious, not national, groups. Consequently, government censuses in 1922 and 1931 would categorize Palestinians confessionally as Muslims, Christians and Jews, with the category of Arab absent.[200]
Musa Alami (1897-1984) was a Palestinian nationalist and politician, viewed in the 1940s as the leader of the Palestinians
The articles of the Mandate mentioned the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine, but not their political status. At the San Remo conference, it was decided to accept the text of those articles, while inserting in the minutes of the conference an undertaking by the Mandatory Power that this would not involve the surrender of any of the rights hitherto enjoyed by the non-Jewish communities in Palestine. In 1922, the British authorities over Mandatory Palestine proposed a draft constitution that would have granted the Palestinian Arabs representation in a Legislative Council on condition that they accept the terms of the mandate. The Palestine Arab delegation rejected the proposal as "wholly unsatisfactory", noting that "the People of Palestine" could not accept the inclusion of the Balfour Declaration in the constitution's preamble as the basis for discussions. They further took issue with the designation of Palestine as a British "colony of the lowest order."[201] The Arabs tried to get the British to offer an Arab legal establishment again roughly ten years later, but to no avail.[202]
After the British general, Louis Bols, read out the Balfour Declaration in February 1920, some 1,500 Palestinians demonstrated in the streets of Jerusalem.[203]
A month later, during the 1920 Nebi Musa riots, the protests against British rule and Jewish immigration became violent and Bols banned all demonstrations. In May 1921 however, further anti-Jewish riots broke out in Jaffa and dozens of Arabs and Jews were killed in the confrontations.[203]
After the 1920 Nebi Musa riots, the San Remo conference and the failure of Faisal to establish the Kingdom of Greater Syria, a distinctive form of Palestinian Arab nationalism took root between April and July 1920.[204][205] With the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the French conquest of Syria, coupled with the British conquest and administration of Palestine, the formerly pan-Syrianist mayor of Jerusalem, Musa Qasim Pasha al-Husayni, said "Now, after the recent events in Damascus, we have to effect a complete change in our plans here. Southern Syria no longer exists. We must defend Palestine".[206]
Conflict between Palestinian nationalists and various types of pan-Arabists continued during the British Mandate, but the latter became increasingly marginalized. Two prominent leaders of the Palestinian nationalists were Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, appointed by the British, and Izz ad-Din al-Qassam.[203] After the killing of sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam by the British in 1935, his followers initiated the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine, which began with a general strike in Jaffa and attacks on Jewish and British installations in Nablus.[203] The Arab Higher Committee called for a nationwide general strike, non-payment of taxes, and the closure of municipal governments, and demanded an end to Jewish immigration and a ban of the sale of land to Jews. By the end of 1936, the movement had become a national revolt, and resistance grew during 1937 and 1938. In response, the British declared martial law, dissolved the Arab High Committee and arrested officials from the Supreme Muslim Council who were behind the revolt. By 1939, 5,000 Arabs had been killed in British attempts to quash the revolt; more than 15,000 were wounded.[203]
In November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Partition Plan, which divided the mandate of Palestine into two states: one majority Arab and one majority Jewish. The Palestinian Arabs rejected the plan and attacked Jewish civilian areas and paramilitary targets. Following Israel's declaration of independence in May 1948, five Arab armies (Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Transjordan) came to the Palestinian Arabs' aid against the newly founded State of Israel.[207]
The Palestinian Arabs suffered such a major defeat at the end of the war, that the term they use to describe the war is Nakba (the "catastrophe").[208] Israel took control of much of the territory that would have been allocated to the Arab state had the Palestinian Arabs accepted the UN partition plan.[207] Along with a military defeat, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from what became the State of Israel. Israel did not allow the Palestinian refugees of the war to return to Israel.[209]
After the war, there was a hiatus in Palestinian political activity. Khalidi attributes this to the traumatic events of 1947–49, which included the depopulation of over 400 towns and villages and the creation of hundreds of thousands of refugees.[210] 418 villages had been razed, 46,367 buildings, 123 schools, 1,233 mosques, 8 churches and 68 holy shrines, many with a long history, destroyed by Israeli forces.[211] In addition, Palestinians lost from 1.5 to 2 million acres of land, an estimated 150,000 urban and rural homes, and 23,000 commercial structures such as shops and offices.[212] Recent estimates of the cost to Palestinians in property confiscations by Israel from 1948 onwards has concluded that Palestinians have suffered a net $300 billion loss in assets.[64]
Those parts of British Mandatory Palestine which did not become part of the newly declared Israeli state were occupied by Egypt or annexed by Jordan. At the Jericho Conference on 1 December 1948, 2,000 Palestinian delegates supported a resolution calling for "the unification of Palestine and Transjordan as a step toward full Arab unity".[213] During what Khalidi terms the "lost years" that followed, Palestinians lacked a center of gravity, divided as they were between these countries and others such as Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere.[214]
In the 1950s, a new generation of Palestinian nationalist groups and movements began to organize clandestinely, stepping out onto the public stage in the 1960s.[215] The traditional Palestinian elite who had dominated negotiations with the British and the Zionists in the Mandate, and who were largely held responsible for the loss of Palestine, were replaced by these new movements whose recruits generally came from poor to middle-class backgrounds and were often students or recent graduates of universities in Cairo, Beirut and Damascus.[215] The potency of the pan-Arabist ideology put forward by Gamal Abdel Nasser—popular among Palestinians for whom Arabism was already an important component of their identity[216]—tended to obscure the identities of the separate Arab states it subsumed.[217]
Since 1967, Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have lived under military occupation, creating, according to Avram Bornstein, a carceralization of their society.[218] In the meantime, pan-Arabism has waned as an aspect of Palestinian identity. The Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank triggered a second Palestinian exodus and fractured Palestinian political and militant groups, prompting them to give up residual hopes in pan-Arabism. They rallied increasingly around the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which had been formed in Cairo in 1964. The group grew in popularity in the following years, especially under the nationalistic orientation of the leadership of Yasser Arafat.[219] Mainstream secular Palestinian nationalism was grouped together under the umbrella of the PLO whose constituent organizations include Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, among other groups who at that time believed that political violence was the only way to "liberate" Palestine.[61] These groups gave voice to a tradition that emerged in the 1960s that argues Palestinian nationalism has deep historical roots, with extreme advocates reading a Palestinian nationalist consciousness and identity back into the history of Palestine over the past few centuries, and even millennia, when such a consciousness is in fact relatively modern.[220]
The Battle of Karameh and the events of Black September in Jordan contributed to growing Palestinian support for these groups, particularly among Palestinians in exile. Concurrently, among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a new ideological theme, known as sumud, represented the Palestinian political strategy popularly adopted from 1967 onward. As a concept closely related to the land, agriculture and indigenousness, the ideal image of the Palestinian put forward at this time was that of the peasant (in Arabic, fellah) who stayed put on his land, refusing to leave. A strategy more passive than that adopted by the Palestinian fedayeen, sumud provided an important subtext to the narrative of the fighters, "in symbolizing continuity and connections with the land, with peasantry and a rural way of life."[221]
In 1974, the PLO was recognized as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people by the Arab nation-states and was granted observer status as a national liberation movement by the United Nations that same year.[62][222] Israel rejected the resolution, calling it "shameful".[223] In a speech to the Knesset, Deputy Premier and Foreign Minister Yigal Allon outlined the government's view that: "No one can expect us to recognize the terrorist organization called the PLO as representing the Palestinians—because it does not. No one can expect us to negotiate with the heads of terror-gangs, who through their ideology and actions, endeavor to liquidate the State of Israel."[223]
In 1975, the United Nations established a subsidiary organ, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, to recommend a program of implementation to enable the Palestinian people to exercise national independence and their rights to self-determination without external interference, national independence and sovereignty, and to return to their homes and property.[224]
The First Intifada (1987–93) was the first popular uprising against the Israeli occupation of 1967. Followed by the PLO's 1988 proclamation of a State of Palestine, these developments served to further reinforce the Palestinian national identity. After the Gulf War in 1991, Kuwaiti authorities forcibly pressured nearly 200,000 Palestinians to leave Kuwait.[225] The policy which partly led to this exodus was a response to the alignment of PLO leader Yasser Arafat with Saddam Hussein.
The Oslo Accords, the first Israeli–Palestinian interim peace agreement, were signed in 1993. The process was envisioned to last five years, ending in June 1999, when the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip and the Jericho area began. The expiration of this term without the recognition by Israel of the Palestinian State and without the effective termination of the occupation was followed by the Second Intifada in 2000.[226][227] The second intifada was more violent than the first.[228] The International Court of Justice observed that since the government of Israel had decided to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people, their existence was no longer an issue. The court noted that the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip of 28 September 1995 also referred a number of times to the Palestinian people and its "legitimate rights".[229] According to Thomas Giegerich, with respect to the Palestinian people's right to form a sovereign independent state, "The right of self-determination gives the Palestinian people collectively the inalienable right freely to determine its political status, while Israel, having recognized the Palestinians as a separate people, is obliged to promote and respect this right in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations".[230]
Following the failures of the Second Intifada, a younger generation is emerging that cares less about nationalist ideology than about economic growth. This has been a source of tension between some of the Palestinian political leadership and Palestinian business professionals who desire economic cooperation with Israelis. At an international conference in Bahrain, Palestinian businessman Ashraf Jabari said, "I have no problem working with Israel. It is time to move on. ... The Palestinian Authority does not want peace. They told the families of the businessmen that they are wanted [by police] for participating in the Bahrain workshop."[231]
In the absence of a comprehensive census including all Palestinian diaspora populations, and those that have remained within what was British Mandate Palestine, exact population figures are difficult to determine. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) announced at the end of 2015 that the number of Palestinians worldwide at the end of 2015 was 12.37 million of which the number still residing within historic Palestine was 6.22 million.[239]
In 2005, a critical review of the PCBS figures and methodology was conducted by the American-Israel Demographic Research Group (AIDRG).[240] In their report,[241] they claimed that several errors in the PCBS methodology and assumptions artificially inflated the numbers by a total of 1.3 million. The PCBS numbers were cross-checked against a variety of other sources (e.g., asserted birth rates based on fertility rate assumptions for a given year were checked against Palestinian Ministry of Health figures as well as Ministry of Education school enrollment figures six years later; immigration numbers were checked against numbers collected at border crossings, etc.). The errors claimed in their analysis included: birth rate errors (308,000), immigration & emigration errors (310,000), failure to account for migration to Israel (105,000), double-counting Jerusalem Arabs (210,000), counting former residents now living abroad (325,000) and other discrepancies (82,000). The results of their research was also presented before the United States House of Representatives on 8 March 2006.[242]
The study was criticised by Sergio DellaPergola, a demographer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.[243] DellaPergola accused the authors of the AIDRG report of misunderstanding basic principles of demography on account of their lack of expertise in the subject, but he also acknowledged that he did not take into account the emigration of Palestinians and thinks it has to be examined, as well as the birth and mortality statistics of the Palestinian Authority.[244] He also accused AIDRG of selective use of data and multiple systematic errors in their analysis, claiming that the authors assumed the Palestinian Electoral registry to be complete even though registration is voluntary, and they used an unrealistically low Total Fertility Ratio (a statistical abstraction of births per woman) to reanalyse that data in a "typical circular mistake." DellaPergola estimated the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza at the end of 2005 as 3.33 million, or 3.57 million if East Jerusalem is included. These figures are only slightly lower than the official Palestinian figures.[243] The Israeli Civil Administration put the number of Palestinians in the West Bank at 2,657,029 as of May 2012.[245][246]
The AIDRG study was also criticized by Ian Lustick, who accused its authors of multiple methodological errors and a political agenda.[247]
In 2009, at the request of the PLO, "Jordan revoked the citizenship of thousands of Palestinians to keep them from remaining permanently in the country."[248]
Many Palestinians have settled in the United States, particularly in the Chicago area.[249][250]
In total, an estimated 600,000 Palestinians are thought to reside in the Americas. Palestinian emigration to South America began for economic reasons that pre-dated the Arab-Israeli conflict, but continued to grow thereafter.[251] Many emigrants were from the Bethlehem area. Those emigrating to Latin America were mainly Christian. Half of those of Palestinian origin in Latin America live in Chile.[9]El Salvador[252] and Honduras[253] also have substantial Palestinian populations. These two countries have had presidents of Palestinian ancestry (Antonio Saca in El Salvador and Carlos Roberto Flores in Honduras). Belize, which has a smaller Palestinian population, has a Palestinian minister – Said Musa.[254]Schafik Jorge Handal, Salvadoran politician and former guerrilla leader, was the son of Palestinian immigrants.[255]
Refugees
December 31, 2022
palestinians, palestinian, redirects, here, other, uses, palestinian, disambiguation, arabic, الفلسطينيون, filasṭīniyyūn, hebrew, ינ, ים, fālasṭīnīm, palestinian, people, الشعب, الفلسطيني, filasṭīnī, also, referred, palestinian, arabs, الفلسطينيين, العرب, fila. Palestinian redirects here For other uses see Palestinian disambiguation Palestinians Arabic الفلسطينيون al Filasṭiniyyun Hebrew פ ל ס ט ינ ים Falasṭinim or Palestinian people الشعب الفلسطيني ash sha b al Filasṭini also referred to as Palestinian Arabs الفلسطينيين العرب al Filasṭiniyyin al ʿArab are an ethnonational group 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 descending from peoples who have inhabited the region of Palestine over the millennia and who are today culturally and linguistically Arab 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 PalestiniansAl Filasṭiniyunالفلسطينيون Flag of PalestineTotal populationc 14 million 1 Regions with significant populations State of Palestine4 750 000 2 3 a West Bank2 930 000 of whom 809 738 are registered refugees as of 2017 4 5 6 Gaza Strip1 880 000 of whom 1 386 455 are registered refugees as of 2018 2 4 5 Jordan2 175 491 2017 registered refugees only 4 3 240 000 2009 7 Israel1 890 000 8 Syria568 530 2021 registered refugees only 4 Chile500 000 9 Saudi Arabia400 000 10 Qatar295 000 10 United States255 000 11 United Arab Emirates200 000 12 Lebanon174 000 2017 census 13 458 369 2016 registered refugees 4 Honduras27 000 200 000 10 14 Germany100 000 15 Kuwait80 000 16 Egypt70 000 10 El Salvador70 000 17 Brazil59 000 18 Libya59 000 10 Iraq57 000 19 Canada50 975 20 Yemen29 000 10 United Kingdom20 000 21 Peru15 000 citation needed Mexico13 000 10 Colombia12 000 10 Netherlands9 000 15 000 22 Australia7 000 est 23 24 Sweden7 000 25 Algeria4 030 26 LanguagesIn Palestine and Israel Arabic Hebrew EnglishDiaspora Local varieties of Arabic and languages of host countries for the Palestinian diasporaReligionMajority Sunni IslamMinority Christianity non denominational Islam Druzism Samaritanism 27 28 Shia Islam 29 Related ethnic groupsOther Arabs and other Semitic speaking peoples Jews and Samaritans Assyrians Arameans etc 30 Despite various wars and exoduses roughly one half of the world s Palestinian population continues to reside in the territory of former British Palestine now encompassing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip the Palestinian territories as well as Israel 46 In this combined area as of 2005 update Palestinians constituted 49 percent of all inhabitants 47 encompassing the entire population of the Gaza Strip 1 865 million 48 the majority of the population of the West Bank approximately 2 785 000 versus some 600 000 Israeli settlers which includes about 200 000 in East Jerusalem and almost 21 percent of the population of Israel proper as part of its Arab citizens 49 Many are Palestinian refugees or internally displaced Palestinians including more than a million in the Gaza Strip 50 around 750 000 in the West Bank 51 and around 250 000 in Israel proper Of the Palestinian population who live abroad known as the Palestinian diaspora more than half are stateless lacking legal citizenship in any country 52 Between 2 1 and 3 24 million of the diaspora population live as refugees in neighboring Jordan 53 54 over 1 million live between Syria and Lebanon and about 750 000 live in Saudi Arabia with Chile holding the largest Palestinian diaspora concentration around half a million outside of the Arab world In 1919 Palestinian Muslims and Palestinian Christians constituted 90 percent of the population of Palestine just before the third wave of Jewish immigration under the British Mandate after World War I 55 56 Opposition to Jewish immigration spurred the consolidation of a unified national identity though Palestinian society was still fragmented by regional class religious and family differences 57 58 The history of the Palestinian national identity is a disputed issue amongst scholars 59 60 the term Palestinian was used to refer to the nationalist concept of a Palestinian people by Palestinian Arabs from the late 19th century albeit in a limited capacity until World War I 42 43 The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and subsequent creation of an individual British Mandate for the region replaced Ottoman citizenship with Palestinian citizenship solidifying a national identity After the Israeli Declaration of Independence the 1948 Palestinian exodus and more so after the 1967 Palestinian exodus the term Palestinian evolved into a sense of a shared future in the form of aspirations for a Palestinian state 42 Today the Palestinian identity encompasses the heritage of all ages from biblical times up to the Ottoman period 61 Founded in 1964 the Palestine Liberation Organization is an umbrella organization for groups that represent the Palestinian people before international states 62 The Palestinian National Authority officially established in 1994 as a result of the Oslo Accords is an interim administrative body nominally responsible for governance in Palestinian population centres in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip 63 Since 1978 the United Nations has observed an annual International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People According to British historian Perry Anderson it is estimated that half of the population in the Palestinian territories are refugees and that they have collectively suffered approximately US 300 billion in property losses due to Israeli confiscations at 2008 2009 prices 64 Contents 1 Etymology 2 Origins 2 1 Pre Arab Islamic influences on the Palestinian national identity 2 2 Arabization of Palestine 2 3 Canaanism 2 4 Relationship to the Jewish people 2 5 DNA and genetic studies 2 5 1 Between the Jews and Palestinians 3 Identity 3 1 Emergence of a distinct identity 4 Rise of Palestinian nationalism 4 1 British Mandate 1917 1947 4 2 War 1947 1949 4 3 Lost years 1949 1967 4 4 1967 present 5 Demographics 5 1 Refugees 5 2 Religion 5 3 Current demographics 6 Society 6 1 Language 6 2 Education 6 3 Women and family 7 Culture 7 1 Cuisine 7 2 Art 7 3 Literature 7 4 Music 7 4 1 Palestinian hip hop 7 4 2 Dance 7 5 Sport 8 See also 9 References 9 1 Notes 9 2 Citations 9 3 Sources 10 External linksEtymologySee also Timeline of the name Palestine The Greek toponym Palaistine Palaistinh which is the origin of the Arabic Filasṭin فلسطين first occurs in the work of the 5th century BCE Greek historian Herodotus where it denotes generally 65 the coastal land from Phoenicia down to Egypt 66 67 Herodotus also employs the term as an ethnonym as when he speaks of the Syrians of Palestine or Palestinian Syrians 68 an ethnically amorphous group he distinguishes from the Phoenicians 69 70 Herodotus makes no distinction between the Jews and other inhabitants of Palestine 71 The Greek word reflects an ancient Eastern Mediterranean Near Eastern word which was used either as a toponym or ethnonym In Ancient Egyptian Peleset Purusati 72 has been conjectured to refer to the Sea Peoples particularly the Philistines 73 74 Among Semitic languages Akkadian Palastu variant Pilistu is used of 7th century Philistia and its by then four city states 75 Biblical Hebrew s cognate word Plistim is usually translated Philistines 76 A depiction of Syria and Palestine from CE 650 to 1500Syria Palestina continued to be used by historians and geographers and others to refer to the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River as in the writings of Philo Josephus and Pliny the Elder During the second or third decades of the 2nd century Syria Palaestina became the official administrative name for the new province that encompassed most of Judaea in a move commonly viewed as an action by emperor Hadrian to disassociate the Jewish people from their historical homeland or as a punishment for the Bar Kokhba revolt 77 78 There is no evidence as to when the name change was implemented or by whom 79 Jacobson suggested the name to be rationalized by the fact that the new province was far larger than geographical Judea with the name of Syria Palaestina already in use for centuries by the time the Bar Kokhba revolt took place 80 81 The new administrative name was printed on coins in inscriptions and even appeared in rabbinic texts 77 82 The Arabic word Filastin has been used to refer to the region since the time of the earliest medieval Arab geographers It appears to have been used as an Arabic adjectival noun in the region since as early as the 7th century CE 83 The Arabic newspaper Falastin est 1911 published in Jaffa by Issa and Yusef al Issa addressed its readers as Palestinians 84 During the Mandatory Palestine period the term Palestinian was used to refer to all people residing there regardless of religion or ethnicity and those granted citizenship by the British Mandatory authorities were granted Palestinian citizenship 85 Other examples include the use of the term Palestine Regiment to refer to the Jewish Infantry Brigade Group of the British Army during World War II and the term Palestinian Talmud which is an alternative name of the Jerusalem Talmud used mainly in academic sources Following the 1948 establishment of Israel the use and application of the terms Palestine and Palestinian by and to Palestinian Jews largely dropped from use For example the English language newspaper The Palestine Post founded by Jews in 1932 changed its name in 1950 to The Jerusalem Post Jews in Israel and the West Bank today generally identify as Israelis Arab citizens of Israel identify themselves as Israeli Palestinian or Arab 86 The Palestinian National Charter as amended by the PLO s Palestinian National Council in July 1968 defined Palestinians as those Arab nationals who until 1947 normally resided in Palestine regardless of whether they were evicted from it or stayed there Anyone born after that date of a Palestinian father whether in Palestine or outside it is also a Palestinian 87 Note that Arab nationals is not religious specific and it includes not only the Arabic speaking Muslims of Palestine but also the Arabic speaking Christians and other religious communities of Palestine who were at that time Arabic speakers such as the Samaritans and Druze Thus the Jews of Palestine were are also included although limited only to the Arabic speaking Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the pre state Zionist invasion The Charter also states that Palestine with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate is an indivisible territorial unit 87 88 OriginsSee also Demographic history of Palestine region Palestinian mother and childThe origins of Palestinians are complex and diverse The region was not originally Arab its Arabization was a consequence of the gradual inclusion of Palestine within the rapidly expanding Islamic Caliphates established by Arabian tribes and their local allies Like in other Arabized Arab nations the Arab identity of Palestinians largely based on linguistic and cultural affiliation is independent of the existence of any actual Arabian origins Palestine has undergone many demographic and religious upheavals throughout history By the 4th century the Jews had become a minority 89 The Jewish population in Jerusalem and its environs in Judea never fully recovered as a result of the Jewish Roman Wars In the following centuries the emigration of Jews and the immigration of Christians as well as the conversions of Jews Samaritans and pagans led to a Christian majority in Late Roman and Byzantine Palestine 90 91 92 In the 7th century the Arab Rashiduns conquered the Levant they were later succeeded by other Arabic speaking Muslim dynasties including the Umayyads Abbasids and the Fatimids 93 Over the following several centuries the population of Palestine drastically decreased from an estimated 1 million during the Roman and Byzantine periods to about 300 000 by the early Ottoman period 94 95 Eventually much of the existing population gradually adopted Arab culture and language and converted to Islam 92 Although minor in size the settlement of Arabs is also thought to have played a role in accelerating the Islamization process 96 97 98 99 Some scholars suggest that by the arrival of the Crusaders Palestine was already overwhelmingly Muslim 100 101 while others claim that it was only after the Crusades that the Christians lost their majority and that the process of mass Islamization took place much later perhaps during the Mamluk period 102 103 For several centuries during the Ottoman period the population in Palestine declined and fluctuated between 150 000 and 250 000 inhabitants and it was only in the 19th century that a rapid population growth began to occur 104 The migration of Egyptians and Algerians to Palestine during the first half of the 19th century and the subsequent immigration of Algerians Bosnians and Circassians during the second half of the century also contributed to this population growth 105 106 107 Pre Arab Islamic influences on the Palestinian national identity While Palestinian culture is today primarily Arab and Islamic many Palestinians identify with earlier civilizations that inhabited the land of Palestine 108 According to Walid Khalidi in Ottoman times the Palestinians considered themselves to be descended not only from Arab conquerors of the seventh century but also from indigenous peoples who had lived in the country since time immemorial In 1876 Claude R Conder of the Palestine Exploration Fund PEF wrote that It is well known to those familiar to the country that whatever else they may be the Fellahin or native peasantry of Palestine are not Arabs and if we judge from the names of the topographical features their language can scarcely be called Arabic 109 Similarly Ali Qleibo a Palestinian anthropologist argues Throughout history a great diversity of peoples has moved into the region and made Palestine their homeland Canaanites Jebusites Philistines from Crete Anatolian and Lydian Greeks Hebrews Amorites Edomites Nabataeans Arameans Romans Arabs and Western European Crusaders to name a few Each of them appropriated different regions that overlapped in time and competed for sovereignty and land Others such as Ancient Egyptians Hittites Persians Babylonians and the Mongol raids of the late 1200s were historical events whose successive occupations were as ravaging as the effects of major earthquakes Like shooting stars the various cultures shine for a brief moment before they fade out of official historical and cultural records of Palestine The people however survive In their customs and manners fossils of these ancient civilizations survived until modernity albeit modernity camouflaged under the veneer of Islam and Arabic culture 108 George Antonius founder of modern Arab nationalist history wrote in his seminal 1938 book The Arab Awakening The Arabs connection with Palestine goes back uninterruptedly to the earliest historic times for the term Arab in Palestine denotes nowadays not merely the incomers from the Arabian Peninsula who occupied the country in the seventh century but also the older populations who intermarried with their conquerors acquired their speech customs and ways of thought and became permanently arabised 110 American historian Bernard Lewis writes Clearly in Palestine as elsewhere in the Middle East the modern inhabitants include among their ancestors those who lived in the country in antiquity Equally obviously the demographic mix was greatly modified over the centuries by migration deportation immigration and settlement This was particularly true in Palestine where the population was transformed by such events as the Jewish rebellion against Rome and its suppression the Arab conquest the coming and going of the Crusaders the devastation and resettlement of the coastlands by the Mamluk and Turkish regimes and from the nineteenth century by extensive migrations from both within and from outside the region Through invasion and deportation and successive changes of rule and of culture the face of the Palestinian population changed several times No doubt the original inhabitants were never entirely obliterated but in the course of time they were successively Judaized Christianized and Islamized Their language was transformed to Hebrew then to Aramaic then to Arabic 111 Arabization of Palestine The term Arab as well as the presence of Arabians in the Syrian Desert and the Fertile Crescent is first seen in the Assyrian sources from the 9th century BCE Eph al 1984 112 Southern Palestine had a large Edomite and Arab population by the 4th century BCE 113 Inscriptional evidence over a millennium from the peripheral areas of Palestine such as the Golan and the Negev show a prevalence of Arab names over Aramaic names from the Persian period 550 330 BCE onwards 114 115 Bedouins have drifted in waves into Palestine since at least the 7th century after the Muslim conquest Some of them like the Arab al Sakhr south of Lake Kinneret trace their origins to the Hejaz or Najd in the Arabian Peninsula while the Ghazawiyya s ancestry is said to go back to the Hauran s Misl al Jizel tribes 116 They speak distinct dialects of Arabic in the Galilee and the Negev 117 Arab populations had existed in some parts of Palestine prior to the conquest and some of these local Arab tribes and Bedouin fought as allies of Byzantium in resisting the invasion which the archaeological evidence indicates was a peaceful conquest dubious discuss and the newcomers were allowed to settle in the old urban areas Theories of population decline compensated by the importation of foreign populations are not confirmed by the archaeological record 99 A loom at work making a traditional Palestinian keffiyeh in Hebron Palestine The keffiyeh is a traditional headdress with origins in Arabia Following the Muslim conquest of the Levant by the Arab Muslim Rashiduns the formerly dominant languages of the area Aramaic and Greek were gradually replaced by the Arabic language introduced by the new conquering administrative minority 118 Among the cultural survivals from pre Islamic times are the significant Palestinian Christian community roughly 10 of the overall population in late Ottoman times and 45 of Jerusalem s citizens 119 and smaller Jewish and Samaritan ones as well as an Aramaic substratum in some local Palestinian Arabic dialects 120 page needed The Christians appear to have maintained a majority in much of both Palestine and Syria under Muslim rule until the Crusades The original conquest in the 630s had guaranteed religious freedom improving that of the Jews and the Samaritans who were classified with the former 121 122 123 However as dhimmi adult males had to pay the jizya or protection tax The economic burden inflicted on some dhimmi communities especially that of the Samaritans sometimes promoted mass conversions 124 When the Crusaders arrived in Palestine during the 11th century they made no distinction between Christians who for the Latin rite were considered heretics Jews and Muslims slaughtering all indiscriminately 125 126 The Crusaders in wresting holy sites such as the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem from the Orthodox church were among several factors that deeply alienated the traditional Christian community which sought relief in the Muslims When Saladin overthrew the Crusaders he restored these sites to Orthodox Christian control 127 Together with the alienating policies of the Crusaders the Mongol Invasion and the rise of the Mamluks were turning points in the fate of Christianity in this region and their congregations many Christians having sided with the Mongols were noticeably reduced under the Mamluks Stricter regulations to control Christian communities ensued theological enmities grew and the process of Arabization and Islamicization strengthened abetted with the inflow of nomadic Bedouin tribes in the 13th and 14th centuries 128 A veiled Arab woman in Bersheeba Palestine c 1940 Palestinian villagers generally trace the origins of their clan hamula to the Arabian peninsula Many avow oral traditions of descent from nomadic Arab tribes that migrated to Palestine during or shortly after the Islamic conquest 129 By this claim they attempt to connect themselves to the greater narrative of Arab Islamic civilization with origins that are more highly valued Arab socio cultural context than to genealogical descent from local ancient pre Arab or pre Islamic peoples Even so these Palestinians still consider themselves to have historical precedence to the Jews 129 whom they regard as Europeans who only began to immigrate to Palestine in the 19th century Many Palestinian families of the notable class a yan claim to trace their origins back to tribes in the Arabian peninsula who settled the area after the Muslim conquest 130 This includes the Nusaybah family of Jerusalem 131 the Tamimi family of Nabi Salih and the Barghouti family of Bani Zeid 132 133 The Shawish al Husayni and Al Zayadina 134 135 clans trace their heritage to Muhammad through his grandsons Husayn ibn Ali and Hassan ibn Ali 136 Arabs in Palestine both Christian and Muslim settled and Bedouin were historically split between the Qays and Yaman factions 137 These divisions had their origins in pre Islamic tribal feuds between Northern Arabians Qaysis and Southern Arabians Yamanis The strife between the two tribal confederacies spread throughout the Arab world with their conquests subsuming even uninvolved families so that the population of Palestine identified with one or the other 137 138 Their conflicts continued after the 8th century Civil war in Palestine until the early 20th century 139 and gave rise to differences in customs tradition and dialect which remain to this day 137 Beit Sahour was first settled in the 14th century by a handful of Christian and Muslim clans hamula from Wadi Musa in Jordan the Christian Jaraisa and the Muslim Shaybat and Jubran who came to work as shepherds for Bethlehem s Christian landowners and they were subsequently joined by other Greek Orthodox immigrants from Egypt in the 17th 18th centuries 140 During the first half of the 19th century there were several waves of immigration from Egypt to Palestine They favored settling in already established localities There used to be 19 villages in the southern coastal plains and near Ramla with families of Egyptian descent and to this day some villages in the northern parts of the region of Samaria especially the Ara Valley have a sizeable population of Egyptian descent 105 In addition some rural and urban Palestinians have Albanian Bosnian Circassian or other non Arab ancestry due to the legacy of the Ottoman period which brought non Arab communities to the region in the 19th century 105 106 107 Canaanism Tawfiq Canaan 1882 1964 was a pioneering Palestinian ethnographer and Palestinian nationalist Deeply interested in Palestinian folklore principally Canaanite Philistine Hebraic Nabatean Syrio Aramaic and Arab 141 Canaan wrote several books and more than 50 articles on the matterClaims emanating from certain circles within Palestinian society and their supporters proposing that Palestinians have direct ancestral connections to the ancient Canaanites without an intermediate Israelite link has been an issue of contention within the context of the Israeli Palestinian conflict Bernard Lewis wrote that the rewriting of the past is usually undertaken to achieve specific political aims In bypassing the biblical Israelites and claiming kinship with the Canaanites the pre Israelite inhabitants of Palestine it is possible to assert a historical claim antedating the biblical promise and possession put forward by the Jews 111 142 Some Palestinian scholars like Zakariyya Muhammad have criticized pro Palestinian arguments based on Canaanite lineage or what he calls Canaanite ideology He states that it is an intellectual fad divorced from the concerns of ordinary people 143 By assigning its pursuit to the desire to predate Jewish national claims he describes Canaanism as a losing ideology whether or not it is factual when used to manage our conflict with the Zionist movement since Canaanism concedes a priori the central thesis of Zionism Namely that we have been engaged in a perennial conflict with Zionism and hence with the Jewish presence in Palestine since the Kingdom of Solomon and before thus in one stroke Canaanism cancels the assumption that Zionism is a European movement propelled by modern European contingencies 143 Commenting on the implications of Canaanite ideology Eric M Meyers a Duke University historian of religion writes What is the significance of the Palestinians really being descended from the Canaanites In the early and more conservative reconstruction of history it might be said that this merely confirms the historic enmity between Israel and its enemies However some scholars believe that Israel actually emerged from within the Canaanite community itself Northwest Semites and allied itself with Canaanite elements against the city states and elites of Canaan Once they were disenfranchised by these city states and elites the Israelites and some disenfranchised Canaanites joined to challenge the hegemony of the heads of the city states and forged a new identity in the hill country based on egalitarian principles and a common threat from without This is another irony in modern politics the Palestinians in truth are blood brothers or cousins of the modern Israelis they are all descendants of Abraham and Ishmael so to speak 144 Relationship to the Jewish people Depiction of Palestine in the time of Saul c 1020 BC according to George Adam Smith s 1915 Atlas of the Historical Geography of the Holy Land A number of pre Mandatory Zionists from Ahad Ha am and Ber Borochov to David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Zvi thought of the Palestinian peasant population as descended from the ancient biblical Hebrews but this belief was disowned when its ideological implications became problematic 143 Ahad Ha am believed that the Moslems of Palestine are the ancient residents of the land who became Christians on the rise of Christianity and became Moslems on the arrival of Islam 143 Israel Belkind the founder of the Bilu movement also asserted that the Palestinian Arabs were the blood brothers of the Jews 145 Ber Borochov one of the key ideological architects of Marxist Zionism claimed as early as 1905 that t he Fellahin in Eretz Israel are the descendants of remnants of the Hebrew agricultural community 146 believing them to be descendants of the ancient Hebrew residents together with a small admixture of Arab blood 143 He further believed that the Palestinian peasantry would embrace Zionism and that the lack of a crystallized national consciousness among Palestinian Arabs would result in their likely assimilation into the new Hebrew nationalism and that Arabs and Jews would unite in class struggle 143 147 David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Zvi later becoming Israel s first Prime Minister and second President respectively suggested in a 1918 paper written in Yiddish that Palestinian peasants and their mode of life were living historical testimonies to Israelite practices in the biblical period 143 148 They wrote that the fellahin are descendants of ancient Jewish and Samaritan peasants who continued farming the land after the Jewish Roman wars converting to Christianity and then to Islam to avoid paying Jizya 149 Tamari notes that the ideological implications of this claim became very problematic and were soon withdrawn from circulation 143 Salim Tamari notes the paradoxes produced by the search for nativist roots among these Zionist figures particularly the Canaanist followers of Yonatan Ratosh 143 who sought to replace the old diasporic Jewish identity with a nationalism that embraced the existing residents of Palestine 150 In his book on the Palestinians The Arabs in Eretz Israel Belkind advanced the idea that the dispersion of Jews out of the Land of Israel after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Roman emperor Titus is a historic error that must be corrected While it dispersed much of the land s Jewish community around the world those workers of the land that remained attached to their land stayed behind and were eventually converted to Christianity and then Islam 145 He therefore proposed that this historical wrong be corrected by embracing the Palestinians as their own and proposed the opening of Hebrew schools for Palestinian Arab Muslims to teach them Arabic Hebrew and universal culture 145 Tsvi Misinai an Israeli researcher entrepreneur and proponent of a controversial alternative solution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict asserts that nearly 90 of all Palestinians living within Israel and the occupied territories including Israel s Arab citizens and Negev Bedouin 151 are descended from the Jewish Israelite peasantry that remained on the land after the others mostly city dwellers were exiled or left 152 Many Palestinians referred to their Jewish neighbors as their awlad ammna or paternal cousins 153 Some Palestinians claim descent from Arab tribes who entered the region during the Islamic conquest and consider themselves to have historical precedence to the Jews whom they regard as Europeans who only began to immigrate to Palestine in the 19th century By such a claim they inserted their family s history into the narrative of Islamic civilization and connected themselves to genealogy that possessed greater prestige than that of ancient or pre Islamic descent 154 Several Palestinian extended families most notably the Makhamra family of Yatta have recent traditions of having a Jewish ancestry 155 156 157 158 DNA and genetic studies See also Genetic studies on Arabs and Genetic history of the Middle East A study found that the Palestinians like Jordanians Syrians Iraqis Turks and Kurds have what appears to be Female Mediated gene flow in the form of Maternal DNA Haplogroups from Sub Saharan Africa 15 of the 117 Palestinian individuals tested carried maternal haplogroups that originated in Sub Saharan Africa These results are consistent with female migration from eastern Africa into Near Eastern communities within the last few thousand years There have been many opportunities for such migrations during this period However the most likely explanation for the presence of predominantly female lineages of African origin in these areas is that they may trace back to women brought from Africa as part of the Arab slave trade assimilated into the areas under Arab rule 159 Palestinian children in Hebron According to a study published in June 2017 by Ranajit Das Paul Wexler Mehdi Pirooznia and Eran Elhaik in Frontiers in Genetics in a principal component analysis PCA of DNA the ancient Levantines from the Natufian and Neolithic periods clustered predominantly with modern day Palestinians and Bedouins 160 In a study published in August 2017 by Marc Haber et al in The American Journal of Human Genetics the authors concluded that The overlap between the Bronze Age and present day Levantines suggests a degree of genetic continuity in the region 161 In a 2003 genetic study Bedouins showed the highest rates 62 5 of the subclade Haplogroup J M267 among all populations tested followed by Palestinian Arabs 38 4 Iraqis 28 2 Ashkenazi Jews 14 6 and Sephardic Jews 11 9 according to Semino et al 162 Semitic speaking populations usually possess an excess of J1 Y chromosomes compared to other populations harboring Y haplogroup J 162 163 164 165 The haplogroup J1 the ancestor of subclade M267 originates south of the Levant and was first disseminated from there into Ethiopia and Europe in Neolithic times J1 is most common in Palestine as well as Syria Iraq Algeria and Arabia and drops sharply at the border of non semitic areas like Turkey and Iran A second diffusion of the J1 marker took place in the 7th century CE when Arabians brought it from Arabia to North Africa 162 A 2013 study by Haber et al found that The predominantly Muslim populations of Syrians Palestinians and Jordanians cluster on branches with other Muslim populations as distant as Morocco and Yemen The authors explained that religious affiliation had a strong impact on the genomes of the Levantines In particular conversion of the region s populations to Islam appears to have introduced major rearrangements in populations relations through admixture with culturally similar but geographically remote populations leading to genetic similarities between remarkably distant populations The study found that Christians and Druze became genetically isolated following the arrival of Islam The authors reconstructed the genetic structure of pre Islamic Levant and found that it was more genetically similar to Europeans than to Middle Easterners 166 In a genetic study of Y chromosomal STRs in two populations from Israel and the Palestinian Authority Area Christian and Muslim Palestinians showed genetic differences The majority of Palestinian Christians 31 82 were a subclade of E1b1b followed by G2a 11 36 and J1 9 09 The majority of Palestinian Muslims were haplogroup J1 37 82 followed by E1b1b 19 33 and T 5 88 The study sample consisted of 44 Palestinian Christians and 119 Palestinian Muslims 167 Between the Jews and Palestinians See also Genetic studies on Jews In recent years genetic studies have demonstrated that at least paternally Jewish ethnic divisions and the Palestinians are related to each other 168 Genetic studies on Jews have shown that Jews and Palestinians are closer to each other than the Jews are to their host countries 169 170 At the haplogroup level defined by the binary polymorphisms only the Y chromosome distribution in Arabs and Jews was similar but not identical 171 According to a 2010 study by Behar et al titled The genome wide structure of the Jewish people Palestinians tested clustered genetically close to Bedouins Jordanians and Saudi Arabians which was described as consistent with a common origin in the Arabian Peninsula 172 In the same year a study by Atzmon and Harry Ostrer concluded that the Palestinians were together with Bedouins Druze and southern European groups the closest genetic neighbors to most Jewish populations 173 Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim in Sevilla 2002 One DNA study by Nebel found substantial genetic overlap among Israeli Palestinian Arabs and Jews 174 Nebel proposed that part or perhaps the majority of Muslim Palestinians descend from local inhabitants mainly Christians and Jews who had converted after the Islamic conquest in the seventh century AD 168 A 2020 study on remains from Canaanaite Bronze Age southern Levantine populations suggests a significant degree of genetic continuity in Arabic speaking Levantine populations such as Palestinians Druze Lebanese Jordanians Bedouins and Syrians as well as in several Jewish groups such as Ashkenazi Iranian and Moroccan Jews suggesting that the aforementioned groups derive over half of their entire atDNA ancestry from Canaanite Bronze Age Levantine populations 175 albeit with varying sources and degrees of admixture from differing host or invading populations depending on each group The results also show that a significant European component was added to the region since the Bronze Age on average 8 7 excluding the Ashkenazi populations who harbour a 41 European related component The European component is highest in Moroccan and Ashkenazi Jews both having a history in Europe 176 The study concludes that this does not mean that any of these present day groups bear direct ancestry from people who lived in the Middle to Late Bronze Age Levant or in Chalcolithic Zagros rather it indicates that they have ancestries from populations whose ancient proxy can be related to the Middle East These present day groups also show ancestries that cannot be modeled by the available ancient DNA data highlighting the importance of additional major genetic effects on the region since the Bronze Age 176 1146 1157 IdentityMain articles History of the Palestinians History of Palestinian nationality and Palestinian nationalism Emergence of a distinct identityThe timing and causes behind the emergence of a distinctively Palestinian national consciousness among the Arabs of Palestine are matters of scholarly disagreement Some argue that it can be traced as far back as the peasants revolt in Palestine in 1834 or even as early as the 17th century while others argue that it did not emerge until after the Mandatory Palestine period 59 177 Legal historian Assaf Likhovski states that the prevailing view is that Palestinian identity originated in the early decades of the 20th century 59 when an embryonic desire among Palestinians for self government in the face of generalized fears that Zionism would lead to a Jewish state and the dispossession of the Arab majority crystallised among most editors Christian and Muslim of local newspapers 178 The term itself Filasṭini was first introduced by Khalil Beidas in a translation of a Russian work on the Holy Land into Arabic in 1898 After that its usage gradually spread so that by 1908 with the loosening of censorship controls under late Ottoman rule a number of Muslim Christian and Jewish correspondents writing for newspapers began to use the term with great frequency in referring to the Palestinian people ahl ahali Filasṭin Palestinians al Filasṭiniyun the sons of Palestine abna Filasṭin or to Palestinian society al mujtama al filasṭini 179 Saladin s Falcon the coat of arms and emblem of the Palestinian Authority Whatever the differing viewpoints over the timing causal mechanisms and orientation of Palestinian nationalism by the early 20th century strong opposition to Zionism and evidence of a burgeoning nationalistic Palestinian identity is found in the content of Arabic language newspapers in Palestine such as Al Karmil est 1908 and Filasteen est 1911 180 Filasteen initially focused its critique of Zionism around the failure of the Ottoman administration to control Jewish immigration and the large influx of foreigners later exploring the impact of Zionist land purchases on Palestinian peasants Arabic فلاحين fellahin expressing growing concern over land dispossession and its implications for the society at large 180 Historian Rashid Khalidi s 1997 book Palestinian Identity The Construction of Modern National Consciousness is considered a foundational text on the subject 181 He notes that the archaeological strata that denote the history of Palestine encompassing the Biblical Roman Byzantine Umayyad Abbasid Fatimid Crusader Ayyubid Mamluk and Ottoman periods form part of the identity of the modern day Palestinian people as they have come to understand it over the last century 61 Noting that Palestinian identity has never been an exclusive one with Arabism religion and local loyalties playing an important role Khalidi cautions against the efforts of some extreme advocates of Palestinian nationalism to anachronistically read back into history a nationalist consciousness that is in fact relatively modern 182 183 Khalidi argues that the modern national identity of Palestinians has its roots in nationalist discourses that emerged among the peoples of the Ottoman empire in the late 19th century that sharpened following the demarcation of modern nation state boundaries in the Middle East after World War I 183 Khalidi also states that although the challenge posed by Zionism played a role in shaping this identity that it is a serious mistake to suggest that Palestinian identity emerged mainly as a response to Zionism 183 Khalil Beidas s 1898 use of the word Palestinians in the preface to his translation of Akim Olesnitsky s A Description of the Holy Land 184 Conversely historian James L Gelvin argues that Palestinian nationalism was a direct reaction to Zionism In his book The Israel Palestine Conflict One Hundred Years of War he states that Palestinian nationalism emerged during the interwar period in response to Zionist immigration and settlement 185 Gelvin argues that this fact does not make the Palestinian identity any less legitimate The fact that Palestinian nationalism developed later than Zionism and indeed in response to it does not in any way diminish the legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism or make it less valid than Zionism All nationalisms arise in opposition to some other Why else would there be the need to specify who you are And all nationalisms are defined by what they oppose 185 David Seddon writes that t he creation of Palestinian identity in its contemporary sense was formed essentially during the 1960s with the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization He adds however that the existence of a population with a recognizably similar name the Philistines in Biblical times suggests a degree of continuity over a long historical period much as the Israelites of the Bible suggest a long historical continuity in the same region 186 Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S Migdal consider the 1834 Peasants revolt in Palestine as constituting the first formative event of the Palestinian people From 1516 to 1917 Palestine was ruled by the Ottoman Empire save a decade from the 1830s to the 1840s when an Egyptian vassal of the Ottomans Muhammad Ali and his son Ibrahim Pasha successfully broke away from Ottoman leadership and conquering territory spreading from Egypt to as far north as Damascus asserted their own rule over the area The so called Peasants Revolt by Palestine s Arabs was precipitated by heavy demands for conscripts The local leaders and urban notables were unhappy about the loss of traditional privileges while the peasants were well aware that conscription was little more than a death sentence Starting in May 1834 the rebels took many cities among them Jerusalem Hebron and Nablus and Ibrahim Pasha s army was deployed defeating the last rebels on 4 August in Hebron 187 Benny Morris argues that the Arabs in Palestine nevertheless remained part of a larger national pan Arab or alternatively pan Islamist movement 188 Walid Khalidi argues otherwise writing that Palestinians in Ottoman times were a cutely aware of the distinctiveness of Palestinian history and a lthough proud of their Arab heritage and ancestry the Palestinians considered themselves to be descended not only from Arab conquerors of the seventh century but also from indigenous peoples who had lived in the country since time immemorial including the ancient Hebrews and the Canaanites before them 189 A 1930 protest in Jerusalem against the British Mandate by Palestinian women The sign reads No dialogue no negotiations until termination of the Mandate Zachary J Foster argued in a 2015 Foreign Affairs article that based on hundreds of manuscripts Islamic court records books magazines and newspapers from the Ottoman period 1516 1918 it seems that the first Arab to use the term Palestinian was Farid Georges Kassab a Beirut based Orthodox Christian He explained further that Kassab s 1909 book Palestine Hellenism and Clericalism noted in passing that the Orthodox Palestinian Ottomans call themselves Arabs and are in fact Arabs despite describing the Arabic speakers of Palestine as Palestinians throughout the rest of the book 190 Bernard Lewis argues it was not as a Palestinian nation that the Arabs of Ottoman Palestine objected to Zionists since the very concept of such a nation was unknown to the Arabs of the area at the time and did not come into being until very much later Even the concept of Arab nationalism in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire had not reached significant proportions before the outbreak of World War I 43 Tamir Sorek a sociologist submits that Although a distinct Palestinian identity can be traced back at least to the middle of the nineteenth century Kimmerling and Migdal 1993 Khalidi 1997b or even to the seventeenth century Gerber 1998 it was not until after World War I that a broad range of optional political affiliations became relevant for the Arabs of Palestine 177 Israeli historian Efraim Karsh takes the view that the Palestinian identity did not develop until after the 1967 war because the Palestinian exodus had fractured society so greatly that it was impossible to piece together a national identity Between 1948 and 1967 the Jordanians and other Arab countries hosting Arab refugees from Palestine Israel silenced any expression of Palestinian identity and occupied their lands until Israel s conquests of 1967 The formal annexation of the West Bank by Jordan in 1950 and the subsequent granting of its Palestinian residents Jordanian citizenship further stunted the growth of a Palestinian national identity by integrating them into Jordanian society 191 The idea of a unique Palestinian state distinct from its Arab neighbors was at first rejected by Palestinian representatives The First Congress of Muslim Christian Associations in Jerusalem February 1919 which met for the purpose of selecting a Palestinian Arab representative for the Paris Peace Conference adopted the following resolution We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria as it has never been separated from it at any time We are connected with it by national religious linguistic natural economic and geographical bonds 192 Rise of Palestinian nationalismSee also Palestinian nationalism UN stamp to commemorate the Palestinian struggle An independent Palestinian state has not exercised full sovereignty over the land in which the Palestinians have lived during the modern era Palestine was administered by the Ottoman Empire until World War I and then overseen by the British Mandatory authorities Israel was established in parts of Palestine in 1948 and in the wake of the 1948 Arab Israeli War the West Bank was ruled by Jordan and the Gaza Strip by Egypt with both countries continuing to administer these areas until Israel occupied them in the Six Day War Historian Avi Shlaim states that the Palestinians lack of sovereignty over the land has been used by Israelis to deny Palestinians their rights to self determination 193 Today the right of the Palestinian people to self determination has been affirmed by the United Nations General Assembly the International Court of Justice 194 and several Israeli authorities 195 A total of 133 countries recognize Palestine as a state 196 However Palestinian sovereignty over the areas claimed as part of the Palestinian state remains limited and the boundaries of the state remain a point of contestation between Palestinians and Israelis British Mandate 1917 1947 Main article Mandatory Palestine The first Palestinian nationalist organizations emerged at the end of the World War I 197 Two political factions emerged al Muntada al Adabi dominated by the Nashashibi family militated for the promotion of the Arabic language and culture for the defense of Islamic values and for an independent Syria and Palestine In Damascus al Nadi al Arabi dominated by the Husayni family defended the same values 198 Article 22 of The Covenant of the League of Nations conferred an international legal status upon the territories and people which had ceased to be under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire as part of a sacred trust of civilization Article 7 of the League of Nations Mandate required the establishment of a new separate Palestinian nationality for the inhabitants This meant that Palestinians did not become British citizens and that Palestine was not annexed into the British dominions 199 The Mandate document divided the population into Jewish and non Jewish and Britain the Mandatory Power considered the Palestinian population to be composed of religious not national groups Consequently government censuses in 1922 and 1931 would categorize Palestinians confessionally as Muslims Christians and Jews with the category of Arab absent 200 Musa Alami 1897 1984 was a Palestinian nationalist and politician viewed in the 1940s as the leader of the Palestinians The articles of the Mandate mentioned the civil and religious rights of the non Jewish communities in Palestine but not their political status At the San Remo conference it was decided to accept the text of those articles while inserting in the minutes of the conference an undertaking by the Mandatory Power that this would not involve the surrender of any of the rights hitherto enjoyed by the non Jewish communities in Palestine In 1922 the British authorities over Mandatory Palestine proposed a draft constitution that would have granted the Palestinian Arabs representation in a Legislative Council on condition that they accept the terms of the mandate The Palestine Arab delegation rejected the proposal as wholly unsatisfactory noting that the People of Palestine could not accept the inclusion of the Balfour Declaration in the constitution s preamble as the basis for discussions They further took issue with the designation of Palestine as a British colony of the lowest order 201 The Arabs tried to get the British to offer an Arab legal establishment again roughly ten years later but to no avail 202 After the British general Louis Bols read out the Balfour Declaration in February 1920 some 1 500 Palestinians demonstrated in the streets of Jerusalem 203 A month later during the 1920 Nebi Musa riots the protests against British rule and Jewish immigration became violent and Bols banned all demonstrations In May 1921 however further anti Jewish riots broke out in Jaffa and dozens of Arabs and Jews were killed in the confrontations 203 After the 1920 Nebi Musa riots the San Remo conference and the failure of Faisal to establish the Kingdom of Greater Syria a distinctive form of Palestinian Arab nationalism took root between April and July 1920 204 205 With the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the French conquest of Syria coupled with the British conquest and administration of Palestine the formerly pan Syrianist mayor of Jerusalem Musa Qasim Pasha al Husayni said Now after the recent events in Damascus we have to effect a complete change in our plans here Southern Syria no longer exists We must defend Palestine 206 Conflict between Palestinian nationalists and various types of pan Arabists continued during the British Mandate but the latter became increasingly marginalized Two prominent leaders of the Palestinian nationalists were Mohammad Amin al Husayni Grand Mufti of Jerusalem appointed by the British and Izz ad Din al Qassam 203 After the killing of sheikh Izz ad Din al Qassam by the British in 1935 his followers initiated the 1936 39 Arab revolt in Palestine which began with a general strike in Jaffa and attacks on Jewish and British installations in Nablus 203 The Arab Higher Committee called for a nationwide general strike non payment of taxes and the closure of municipal governments and demanded an end to Jewish immigration and a ban of the sale of land to Jews By the end of 1936 the movement had become a national revolt and resistance grew during 1937 and 1938 In response the British declared martial law dissolved the Arab High Committee and arrested officials from the Supreme Muslim Council who were behind the revolt By 1939 5 000 Arabs had been killed in British attempts to quash the revolt more than 15 000 were wounded 203 War 1947 1949 Main article 1948 Arab Israeli War Abd al Qadir al Husayni leader of the Army of the Holy War in 1948 In November 1947 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Partition Plan which divided the mandate of Palestine into two states one majority Arab and one majority Jewish The Palestinian Arabs rejected the plan and attacked Jewish civilian areas and paramilitary targets Following Israel s declaration of independence in May 1948 five Arab armies Lebanon Egypt Syria Iraq and Transjordan came to the Palestinian Arabs aid against the newly founded State of Israel 207 The Palestinian Arabs suffered such a major defeat at the end of the war that the term they use to describe the war is Nakba the catastrophe 208 Israel took control of much of the territory that would have been allocated to the Arab state had the Palestinian Arabs accepted the UN partition plan 207 Along with a military defeat hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from what became the State of Israel Israel did not allow the Palestinian refugees of the war to return to Israel 209 Boundaries defined in the 1947 UN Partition Plan for Palestine Area assigned for a Jewish state Area assigned for an Arab state Planned Corpus separatum with the intention that Jerusalem would be neither Jewish nor ArabArmistice Demarcation Lines of 1949 Green Line Israeli controlled territory from 1949 Egyptian and Jordanian controlled territory from 1948 until 1967 Lost years 1949 1967 After the war there was a hiatus in Palestinian political activity Khalidi attributes this to the traumatic events of 1947 49 which included the depopulation of over 400 towns and villages and the creation of hundreds of thousands of refugees 210 418 villages had been razed 46 367 buildings 123 schools 1 233 mosques 8 churches and 68 holy shrines many with a long history destroyed by Israeli forces 211 In addition Palestinians lost from 1 5 to 2 million acres of land an estimated 150 000 urban and rural homes and 23 000 commercial structures such as shops and offices 212 Recent estimates of the cost to Palestinians in property confiscations by Israel from 1948 onwards has concluded that Palestinians have suffered a net 300 billion loss in assets 64 Those parts of British Mandatory Palestine which did not become part of the newly declared Israeli state were occupied by Egypt or annexed by Jordan At the Jericho Conference on 1 December 1948 2 000 Palestinian delegates supported a resolution calling for the unification of Palestine and Transjordan as a step toward full Arab unity 213 During what Khalidi terms the lost years that followed Palestinians lacked a center of gravity divided as they were between these countries and others such as Syria Lebanon and elsewhere 214 In the 1950s a new generation of Palestinian nationalist groups and movements began to organize clandestinely stepping out onto the public stage in the 1960s 215 The traditional Palestinian elite who had dominated negotiations with the British and the Zionists in the Mandate and who were largely held responsible for the loss of Palestine were replaced by these new movements whose recruits generally came from poor to middle class backgrounds and were often students or recent graduates of universities in Cairo Beirut and Damascus 215 The potency of the pan Arabist ideology put forward by Gamal Abdel Nasser popular among Palestinians for whom Arabism was already an important component of their identity 216 tended to obscure the identities of the separate Arab states it subsumed 217 1967 present See also Six Day WarSince 1967 Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have lived under military occupation creating according to Avram Bornstein a carceralization of their society 218 In the meantime pan Arabism has waned as an aspect of Palestinian identity The Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank triggered a second Palestinian exodus and fractured Palestinian political and militant groups prompting them to give up residual hopes in pan Arabism They rallied increasingly around the Palestine Liberation Organization PLO which had been formed in Cairo in 1964 The group grew in popularity in the following years especially under the nationalistic orientation of the leadership of Yasser Arafat 219 Mainstream secular Palestinian nationalism was grouped together under the umbrella of the PLO whose constituent organizations include Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine among other groups who at that time believed that political violence was the only way to liberate Palestine 61 These groups gave voice to a tradition that emerged in the 1960s that argues Palestinian nationalism has deep historical roots with extreme advocates reading a Palestinian nationalist consciousness and identity back into the history of Palestine over the past few centuries and even millennia when such a consciousness is in fact relatively modern 220 Yasser Arafat Nayef Hawatmeh and Kamal Nasser in a Jordan press conference in Amman 1970The Battle of Karameh and the events of Black September in Jordan contributed to growing Palestinian support for these groups particularly among Palestinians in exile Concurrently among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip a new ideological theme known as sumud represented the Palestinian political strategy popularly adopted from 1967 onward As a concept closely related to the land agriculture and indigenousness the ideal image of the Palestinian put forward at this time was that of the peasant in Arabic fellah who stayed put on his land refusing to leave A strategy more passive than that adopted by the Palestinian fedayeen sumud provided an important subtext to the narrative of the fighters in symbolizing continuity and connections with the land with peasantry and a rural way of life 221 In 1974 the PLO was recognized as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people by the Arab nation states and was granted observer status as a national liberation movement by the United Nations that same year 62 222 Israel rejected the resolution calling it shameful 223 In a speech to the Knesset Deputy Premier and Foreign Minister Yigal Allon outlined the government s view that No one can expect us to recognize the terrorist organization called the PLO as representing the Palestinians because it does not No one can expect us to negotiate with the heads of terror gangs who through their ideology and actions endeavor to liquidate the State of Israel 223 In 1975 the United Nations established a subsidiary organ the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People to recommend a program of implementation to enable the Palestinian people to exercise national independence and their rights to self determination without external interference national independence and sovereignty and to return to their homes and property 224 Protest for Palestine in Tunisia The First Intifada 1987 93 was the first popular uprising against the Israeli occupation of 1967 Followed by the PLO s 1988 proclamation of a State of Palestine these developments served to further reinforce the Palestinian national identity After the Gulf War in 1991 Kuwaiti authorities forcibly pressured nearly 200 000 Palestinians to leave Kuwait 225 The policy which partly led to this exodus was a response to the alignment of PLO leader Yasser Arafat with Saddam Hussein The Oslo Accords the first Israeli Palestinian interim peace agreement were signed in 1993 The process was envisioned to last five years ending in June 1999 when the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip and the Jericho area began The expiration of this term without the recognition by Israel of the Palestinian State and without the effective termination of the occupation was followed by the Second Intifada in 2000 226 227 The second intifada was more violent than the first 228 The International Court of Justice observed that since the government of Israel had decided to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people their existence was no longer an issue The court noted that the Israeli Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip of 28 September 1995 also referred a number of times to the Palestinian people and its legitimate rights 229 According to Thomas Giegerich with respect to the Palestinian people s right to form a sovereign independent state The right of self determination gives the Palestinian people collectively the inalienable right freely to determine its political status while Israel having recognized the Palestinians as a separate people is obliged to promote and respect this right in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations 230 Following the failures of the Second Intifada a younger generation is emerging that cares less about nationalist ideology than about economic growth This has been a source of tension between some of the Palestinian political leadership and Palestinian business professionals who desire economic cooperation with Israelis At an international conference in Bahrain Palestinian businessman Ashraf Jabari said I have no problem working with Israel It is time to move on The Palestinian Authority does not want peace They told the families of the businessmen that they are wanted by police for participating in the Bahrain workshop 231 DemographicsMain articles Demographics of the Palestinian territories Demographics of Israel and Demographics of Jordan Country or region PopulationPalestinian Territories Gaza Strip and West Bank including East Jerusalem 4 420 549 3 Jordan 2 700 000 232 Israel 1 318 000 233 Chile 500 000 largest community outside the Middle East 234 235 236 Syria 434 896 237 Lebanon 405 425 237 Saudi Arabia 327 000 233 The Americas 225 000 238 Egypt 44 200 238 Kuwait approx 40 000 233 Other Gulf states 159 000 233 Other Arab states 153 000 233 Other countries 308 000 233 TOTAL 10 574 521In the absence of a comprehensive census including all Palestinian diaspora populations and those that have remained within what was British Mandate Palestine exact population figures are difficult to determine The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics PCBS announced at the end of 2015 that the number of Palestinians worldwide at the end of 2015 was 12 37 million of which the number still residing within historic Palestine was 6 22 million 239 In 2005 a critical review of the PCBS figures and methodology was conducted by the American Israel Demographic Research Group AIDRG 240 In their report 241 they claimed that several errors in the PCBS methodology and assumptions artificially inflated the numbers by a total of 1 3 million The PCBS numbers were cross checked against a variety of other sources e g asserted birth rates based on fertility rate assumptions for a given year were checked against Palestinian Ministry of Health figures as well as Ministry of Education school enrollment figures six years later immigration numbers were checked against numbers collected at border crossings etc The errors claimed in their analysis included birth rate errors 308 000 immigration amp emigration errors 310 000 failure to account for migration to Israel 105 000 double counting Jerusalem Arabs 210 000 counting former residents now living abroad 325 000 and other discrepancies 82 000 The results of their research was also presented before the United States House of Representatives on 8 March 2006 242 The study was criticised by Sergio DellaPergola a demographer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem 243 DellaPergola accused the authors of the AIDRG report of misunderstanding basic principles of demography on account of their lack of expertise in the subject but he also acknowledged that he did not take into account the emigration of Palestinians and thinks it has to be examined as well as the birth and mortality statistics of the Palestinian Authority 244 He also accused AIDRG of selective use of data and multiple systematic errors in their analysis claiming that the authors assumed the Palestinian Electoral registry to be complete even though registration is voluntary and they used an unrealistically low Total Fertility Ratio a statistical abstraction of births per woman to reanalyse that data in a typical circular mistake DellaPergola estimated the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza at the end of 2005 as 3 33 million or 3 57 million if East Jerusalem is included These figures are only slightly lower than the official Palestinian figures 243 The Israeli Civil Administration put the number of Palestinians in the West Bank at 2 657 029 as of May 2012 245 246 The AIDRG study was also criticized by Ian Lustick who accused its authors of multiple methodological errors and a political agenda 247 In 2009 at the request of the PLO Jordan revoked the citizenship of thousands of Palestinians to keep them from remaining permanently in the country 248 Many Palestinians have settled in the United States particularly in the Chicago area 249 250 In total an estimated 600 000 Palestinians are thought to reside in the Americas Palestinian emigration to South America began for economic reasons that pre dated the Arab Israeli conflict but continued to grow thereafter 251 Many emigrants were from the Bethlehem area Those emigrating to Latin America were mainly Christian Half of those of Palestinian origin in Latin America live in Chile 9 El Salvador 252 and Honduras 253 also have substantial Palestinian populations These two countries have had presidents of Palestinian ancestry Antonio Saca in El Salvador and Carlos Roberto Flores in Honduras Belize which has a smaller Palestinian population has a Palestinian minister Said Musa 254 Schafik Jorge Handal Salvadoran politician and former guerrilla leader was the son of Palestinian immigrants 255 Refugees div, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,
